Opinion: Guest Opinions

Stephanie Greenberg and Beth Ornstein: Remembering Sandy Hook

Connecticut resident Rachel Pullen, center, kisses her son Landon DeCecco at a memorial on Dec. 16, 2012 for victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. (Mario Tama / Getty Images North America)

Dec. 14 is the fifth anniversary of the massacre of 20 six- and seven-year-old children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. For a short time, this horrific event shattered the country's complacency about gun-safety laws and led a number of states, including Colorado, to pass common-sense gun-violence prevention laws. However, Congress has not yet taken a single action to prevent more gun deaths.

Gun violence represents a significant public-health threat that must be addressed now! More than 38,000 Americans lost their lives to guns in 2016 — over 104 people a day. In Colorado, 802 people lost their lives to firearms in 2016, and the numbers and rates per capita have increased. Additionally, more than double the number of people who are killed by guns are hospitalized every year with gunshot injuries.

Suicide is the leading cause of gun deaths, accounting for more than 60 percent in the U.S. and nearly 80 percent in Colorado. Guns are the most common means of committing suicide (half of all suicide deaths in the U.S.). At least two recent studies have found that states with high rates of gun ownership have higher suicide rates than states with low rates of gun ownership The impulsivity characteristic of suicide attempts combined with the lethality of guns puts suicidal individuals with access to guns at great risk.

Responsible gun owners store their guns and ammunition safely. Of the estimated 33 percent of American households with at least one gun, how many gun owners do not practice safe storage, thereby jeopardizing members of their household and others?

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Although mass shootings are rare, they are heart-breaking, chilling, and recurring. Mass shootings are becoming more lethal, with three of the five deadliest shootings occurring since Orlando in June 2016. Crime experts were perplexed after Las Vegas because that shooter didn't seem to fit existing profiles. What they missed is the most obvious cause — high-powered, military-style weapons that are far too easy to access.

The NRA would have us believe that if more civilians carried guns, we would all be a lot safer. Yet police investigating the recent shooting deaths of three people in a Thornton Walmart reported that the presence of civilians with drawn guns hampered their efforts to identify the shooter. People carrying guns don't necessarily have the training and experience to do anything but impede police efforts in an active shooting situation. In domestic violence situations in which a gun is present, women are five times more likely to be killed than when a gun is not present. Guns do not keep people safer.

Although gun violence has often been attributed to mental illness, only an estimated 4 percent of violence against others is caused by those with serious mental illnesses — the same percentage that those individuals comprise of the total population. Impulsivity, anger, traumatic life events such as job loss or divorce, and problematic alcohol use are all stronger risk factors for gun violence.

A 2016 study of 292 incidents worldwide in which four or more people were killed found that 90 of them occurred in the U.S. Why? The U.S. has much higher rates of gun ownership and gun homicides than other developed countries. With only 5 percent of the world's population, the U.S. has almost half of the civilian-owned guns around the world. Although other developed countries have mental illness, poverty, domestic violence, and other social problems, none of our peer nations experience our rates of gun violence.

Rather than throw up our hands in despair, we urge all Americans to take action. Different types of gun violence require different strategies. Although we are limited in our understanding of best strategies by the 1996 Dickey Amendment that effectively ended most federal research into gun violence by defunding it at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are still common-sense policies and practices that we can advocate for in an effort to reduce gun violence.

At the state level, we can demand that our state legislators protect Colorado's five common-sense gun laws passed in the wake of Sandy Hook. At the federal level: universal background checks; limits on the number of rounds that can be fired without needing to reload; improvements in reporting the names of people barred from buying guns into the FBI's background check system; mandatory waiting periods; and more education about safe storage.

This is not about the Second Amendment or opposition to gun ownership. This is about public safety! In memory of the Sandy Hook victims, let's take action! We can make a change!

Stephanie Greenberg and Beth Ornstein live in Boulder and are members of the Congregation Bonai Shalom Working Group on Gun Violence Prevention.

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